Presumably because James Levine is now considered a local property,
rented at a prodigious price, Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung's dispatched
its very savvy, with-it music critic to new York to review the premiere
of the Met's new production of Tristan.  Reinhard J.  Brembeck was not
impressed.  Among the singers, he expressed especially faint praise for
Bruce Heppner (Tristan), but he did pass on the news that Rene Pape (Marke)
not only clicked with the audience but wowed it.

The trouble was, our reviewer opined, that Dieter Dorn, who directed,
plus Juergen Rose, who staged, plus Max Keller, who did the lighting had in
mind a Regie Oper idea that Levine, the singers, and the orchesta couldn't
fathom and therefore failed to perform.  The nub of Dorn & Co.'s vision was
not the usual reading of tragedy into the Tristan-und-Isolde love story,
but instead the gender conflict between them.  The Dorn Tristan was to have
been a male capable "of expressisng his morality only in extremes...and
therefore incapable of love.  Isolde he desires not naked and revealed;
rather, he wants to compel her to join him in his empire of the night, and
there to let her rot." But Isolde will not comply.  In the end she mourns
Tristan only "in the name of life and for the love that perhaps might have
been."

Much as did Isolde, so Levine and the performers went their own way.
Brembeck does concede that Levine's conducting was "interesting" -- "Wagner
light." In fairness he even reports that the audience rewarded the
performers with ovations while booing Dorn, Rose and Keller.

"Under these conditons," Brembeck asks,"how can one do modern opera?"

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]